Field note Example

In the departmental space – at the back of the building –one boy (a Caucasian male, short light-brown hair, lean) sat at a small round table. He stared intently at the computer screen – both hands on either side of the computer, gripping the table edge, tilting his chair back – balancing it on the rear 2 pegs – as he leans, hunches, forward. It seemed like the computer was about to suck him in. The laptop open, the screen light glaring on his face, an open textbook, papers sprawled – on table and floor.

I went in to the departmental space. The boy did not say anything to me, nor I to him. I took a seat at an adjacent table that was largely to this boy’s back. Neither my entrance nor presence seemed to disturb or distract any attention away from his computer/his work. He sat there. He stared at the computer screen, tweaking forward and back on the chair’s rear legs. He did this for over 5 minutes. Then he let the chair return to the ground, sat up straight, and began writing – jotting? – things on a piece of paper. He’d write on the paper, then look at/look something up on the computer, and then back to his piece of paper. It appeared he was writing in pen.

From where I was sitting, I could not see what he was writing – or jotting – so I got up, walked past him, as I exited the departmental space. From the brief glance I gathered that he was working on sort of problem set/physics problems, and was consulting the computer for – at least at the time I passed – equations.